What did Theresa May expect when she appointed Boris Johnson Foreign Secretary? Did she think he would keep his head down over the road from Downing Street, quietly and earnestly ploughing on with a post-Brexit foreign policy?

The reaction to Johnson’s criticism of Saudi Arabia “puppeteering” and waging “proxy wars” in the Middle East has been Pavlovian: he says something outlandish, and it is immediately, unthinkingly dismissed as a gaffe.